Julie Smith, Best Video’s executive director, stood before the crowd of about 20 moviegoers who had assembled for the film and cultural center’s Tuesday night screening. “I know this film generally brings up a lot of conversation, so stick around,” she said. The film in question was Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, kicking off Best Video’s series of screenings of movies by the acclaimed director, that proceeds every Tuesday of the month through Sept. 26.
Taxi Driver — for those who may not have seen it — tells the story of Travis Bickle, a man who signs up to drive a taxi in 1970s New York City after having served as a Marine in Vietnam. The gritty, bleak story has two main tracks. One track is about the further decline of Bickle’s already shaky mental state. The other track is about the meanness of the nighttime New York he encounters, full of prostitution, drugs, and violence, and the vapidity of its daytime life, exemplified by the people around a candidate running for president who has very little to say. The two tracks gradually, inexorably merge, the effects of one amplifying the effects of the other, with results that still have the power to unsettle and horrify today.
Taxi Driver is routinely seen as the movie that put the then-32-year-old Martin Scorsese on the map as an important American film director. It won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 1976 and began his longtime collaboration with the actor Robert De Niro, who stars as Bickle. The movie is something of a who’s who of great 1970s character actors, from Peter Boyle as an older taxi driver who’s been around a lot of blocks, to Harvey Keitel as a thoroughly greasy pimp, to Cybill Shepard as the object of Bickle’s desires. Most famously, it features then-12-year-old Jodie Foster, who got an Oscar nod for her role as Iris, a sex-trafficked prostitute of the same age whom Bickle is all too determined to rescue from her situation. It makes endless lists of best American movies from the 1970s — you could argue that it in many ways epitomizes 1970s American filmmaking — and best American movies, period.
It’s easy to understand why. Scorsese’s direction and camerawork are flawless and already show the kind of ingenuity that he would explore further in later movies. His ideas for how to tell a story visually remain as fresh as they were then. The actors uniformly deliver detailed, committed performances, especially De Niro and Foster. And there is a certain bravery in Paul Schrader’s acclaimed script, in being willing to go as bleak as it does. Scorsese himself has a cameo as one of Bickle’s taxi passengers, acting a short scene so excoriating that it’s tempting to imagine he did it himself to avoid making another actor do it for him.
And yet, going into this movie, none of the above prevented me from remembering my own reaction to Taxi Driver, watching it at the age of 20, almost 30 years ago: that I thought the movie was kind of stupid. That the character study of Bickle wasn’t nearly as deep as I had been told it was, and the grittiness of 1970s New York was perhaps a little too slathered on. That Taxi Driver delivered plenty of shock and some quite memorable scenes but precious little insight, into either Bickle’s deteriorating psychological state or the urban landscape he drove through. Did I really need Martin Scorsese to tell me that some people are awful, and a lot of people live desperate lives? Or could I just read the news and live life with my eyes open?
Such was my insouciance toward this movie that, in 2011, when the unapologetic grindhouse flick Hobo with a Shotgun hit the Criterion and a friend convinced me (pretty easily) to go with him to see it, it occurred to me that one could write an essay about how it and Taxi Driver were essentially the same movie. Both featured lone wolves railing against the depredations of a hyper-violent city. Both featured intensely committed central performances (Hobo with a Shotgun stars Rutger Hauer, who, against all reason, acts well above what was surely his pay grade to make that movie), a man trying to save a girl, and some scenes you wish you could unsee. The only real difference to me at the time was that everyone had decided Taxi Driver was celebrated art and Hobo bottom-feeder entertainment. Explaining why that distinction was spurious would be my magnum opus about the shell game that is highbrow versus lowbrow culture. Thankfully, this very paragraph is as far as I ever got with that.
All of this is to say that I arrived at Best Video with low expectations. Though also, as 20-year-old me had been very wrong about all kinds of things, I was fully prepared to be wrong about Taxi Driver, too.
The respectful audience at Best Video sat mostly in silence, though breaking into laughter at its many jokes, as Scorsese unfolded his dark tale. As Smith had predicted, as the credits rolled, several people did in fact feel the need to discuss what they had just watched. One viewer, an older woman, declared it to be a work of genius right from the start. The discussion immediately turned to the very ending of the movie (which I won’t spoil here) and whether it was reality or a delusion in which Bickle was “able to work out all of his fantasies.” A younger man wondered what exactly Betsy, Cybill Shepard’s character, could possibly have seen in him initially, before a very disastrous second date.
“The director gives him sensitivity,” one audience member said. “He has a take on life.”
“He’s out of his mind,” countered another.
“We all may be out of our minds,” countered a third, who proceeded to talk about Scorsese’s take on 1970s New York as a “city filled with garbage” — “I loved it at the time,” he added. The conversation turned to Bickle’s status as a Vietnam vet, about which we only have a few clues that may point to PTSD, psychopathy, or both. “He’s desperate to be the hero,” one said — an opportunity Vietnam vets were denied, as opposed to World War II vets a generation before.
The conversation then turned to a pivotal (funny and chilling) scene in which Bickle buys guns from a shady salesman. One viewer pointed out that each of the guns Bickle bought was freighted with cultural consequence, from Dirty Harry to Mike Hammer to James Bond. The scene was “American gun culture on a small scale.” It was also possible to cast Bickle in the much more recent mold of an incel — a way in which the movie resonated in the present. The idea that Scorsese was glorifying Bickle or the violence within and around him was hard to support; if anything, it was a critique.
“Saving the country by acts of sacrificial violence doesn’t work,” said one viewer of his takeaway from the film. “But that’s America.”
It’s safe to say that Hobo with a Shotgun doesn’t engender the same kind of conversation as happened after Taxi Driver, which is a way of saying that 20-year-old me was, indeed, wrong. Watching it at 48, I was struck by surface-level details I took for granted: the haunting cinematography that ratchets up the tension with every passing scene, Bernard Herrmann’s powerful, effective musical score, the naturalistic performances that feel thoroughly lived in.
Taxi Driver is aging well in the sense that (sadly) we are better able to talk about it now than before. It can be understood as focusing on what we’d now call toxic masculinity. Bickle’s manifesto sounds like actual manifestoes produced since, from the Unabomber to mass shooter Elliott Rodger. Like a few other movies from the era, it captures 1970s New York, and reminds us how that city has changed. In Taxi Driver’s case, that comes with a twist: Travis Bickle would probably like present-day New York a lot more, though he would also likely not be able to afford to live there.
At the same time, while I found much more to admire in Taxi Driver, I still agreed with my 20-year-old self in the sense that I found it unsatisfying, a movie that delivered far more heat than light. What was the point, in the end? But that, in a way, is what makes the film the right opening gambit for Best Video’s Scorsese film series, which will proceed through The King of Comedy on Sept. 12, possibly Scorsese’s masterpiece GoodFellas on Sept. 19, and Gangs of New York on Sept. 26. Out of a vast body of work (I personally find GoodFellas to be often hilarious and always engrossing, and I’m one of those people who thinks Shutter Island is devastatingly sad) even those four films show Scorsese’s finest qualities. You don’t have to love all his films to see in his work a director who is still challenging himself at the age of 80, whose restless spirit has led him to make, sure, a series of mob movies, but also movies about Howard Hughes and mental institutions and children’s books. With every movie, he rolls the dice, and goes all in.
